Here Is Your Mother

In a previous post, I asked why the writers of the TV show?House chose for last week’s episode (“A Pox on our House“) to have a sick family composed of a recently married husband and wife who each bring to the marriage a child from a previous relationship.

I think the writers were setting up a parallel with the episode’s opening.? In the opening, which is set in the past on a slave ship, some African captives who have contracted an infectious disease are about to be thrown overboard.? A sick father, who is about to be killed, turns to his healthy son, and says, pointing to another adult:? “Naola is now your father.”

This heart-rending ship scene foreshadows what happens later in the episode (and 200 years later in the narrative’s chronology), when a dying father tells his biological son that the son’s new stepmother will take care of him.? Metaphorically, the father is also saying to his boy that another adult is now your parent.

I imagine that both events are supposed to remind us of?John 19:26-27, where Jesus from the cross says to his mother:

“Woman, here is your son,” and to the disciple, “Here is your mother.”

House and the Bible: in the former, a dying father trusts his son to another man; in the latter, a dying son gives his mother a surrogate son, and so the two are connected?

Yes they have a commonality — a theme of “familial transplant” — but this doesn’t seem very useful or relevant. Consider that Warren Buffet and I are connected because we both wore a blue shirt on Tuesday. It’s true, but that fact doesn’t contribute anything useful.

This thought also seems like a big stretch, and to my mind, therefore, unlikely to have occurred also in the minds of the show’s writers.